In college in Budapest Polanyi founded the radical Club Galilei, which would have far-reaching effects on Hungarian intellectual life. He qualified as a lawyer in 1912 and served as a cavalry officer during World War I. Once back home he founded the Radical Citizens Party of Hungary. He then had to leave Hungary for political reasons. After working in Vienna as an economic journalist (1924–33), he moved to England and then, in 1940, to the United States. He was professor of economics at Columbia University (1947–53).

Polanyi was not a conventional economist but was instead concerned with the development of an overall view of the functioning of economic relationships within different social frameworks. This led him to detailed historical and anthropological studies. He produced three works based on the theme of the market economy as a special form of social organization. The Great Transformation (1944) concentrated on the development of the market economy in the 19th century, with Polanyi presenting his belief that this form of economy was so socially divisive that it had no long-term future. The second volume, Trade and Markets in the Early Empires (1957, written with others), concentrated on nonmarket forms of society. Polanyi developed a conceptual framework for what he regarded as nonmarket economies. His final work, published posthumously, was Dahomey and the Slave Trade (1966), which analyzed the economic structure of a slave-exporting state.

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